Until the land was expropriated to make way for new developments, Oakville was home to an exceptional tropical fish store. At its center was a massive circular aquarium filled with sharks and other predatory fish, and once each week the employees would host a feeding frenzy that was open to the public. One of them would climb a ladder to the top of the tank and begin to toss pieces of meat to the creatures lurking below. No sooner did the flesh hit the surface and the blood begin to seep into the water, than the sharks went mad, thrashing, circling, fighting over the bits. Rarely did a piece make it all the way to the bottom before two, three, or four sharks were battling over it, shredding it, gobbling it down.

They could almost have been us—people who so often delight to tear one another apart, to focus on flaws more than virtues, to be critical rather than encouraging, harsh rather than tender, vindictive rather than merciful.
I recently found myself studying the Parable of the Good Samaritan and marveling at its example of mercy. Because that particular example is bound to a certain setting and context, I spent some time pondering the ways in which it is applicable to today—the ways in which in teaches people like you and me to show divine mercy rather than human ruthlessness. Let me offer a few.
We can show mercy toward people’s suffering. This is the most obvious category and the one that Jesus spoke of in his parable. As we see people in need—people who are destitute or downcast or sorrowing or suffering—it is right and good to feel compassion and to then act in love toward them. Like the priest, Levite, and Samaritan, we will just be going through life and in God’s providence he will provide opportunities where we see people who have some kind of want or some kind of need. And in those moments we ought to feel compassion for them and then be eager to extend mercy, perhaps in the form of comfort or a meal or a helping hand or money. There is infinite need in this world and, therefore, an infinite number of ways we can show mercy to those who suffer.
We can show mercy toward people’s souls. As we encounter people who don’t know Jesus, we can extend mercy by tending to their spiritual needs, which usually means alerting them to their spiritual need. Far more people know their financial poverty than their spiritual poverty. Don’t we feel a deep compassion toward those who do not know Jesus and who don’t even know that they need him? Don’t we have concern for them? Then we need to tell them about Jesus! We need to tell them about the perilous state of their souls! The duty of evangelism flows out of pity for those who do not know the God who is so merciful toward sinners.
We can show mercy toward people’s reputations. Solomon says “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches,” but we sometimes find such delight in destroying a person’s name and lowering their reputation all the way to the gutter. Compassion calls us to feel the harm that is being done to them by having their reputation destroyed. We can show mercy by speaking well of people instead of speaking ill; we can show mercy by refusing to pass along gossip; we can show mercy by choosing to look for evidences of grace in a person rather than evidences of sinfulness; we can show mercy by refusing to share information that is unproven or just plain unnecessary. We can be merciful where others are being brutal and have compassion upon others by protecting and enhancing their good name. (For more on this see here.)
We can show mercy toward people’s weaknesses. God calls us to share the world, to share our homes, and to share our churches with people who are weak. Even setting aside their sinfulness, they are still beset by weaknesses. And we ought to be gentle and patient and merciful in those weaknesses. Wives should be merciful with their husband’s annoying habits; husbands should be merciful with their wife’s irritating foibles; Christians should patiently bear with church members who differ with them on matters of conscience or who have little knowledge of how to honor God or little understanding of the freedom the gospel offers us. Compassion calls us to feel love for them rather than apathy or frustration or hatred. It calls us to bear with them rather than rebuke them. It calls us to joyfully show mercy to them.
We can have mercy toward people’s sins. We will inevitably see people behave in sinful ways and sometimes even see them sin against us. And while our first thought is usually outrage and vindication, perhaps our first thought ought to be pity—to feel compassion for them in their sin, compassion that they are sinners. Sometimes mercy is overlooking an offense, simply setting it aside as if it never happened. The Bible says “it’s the glory of a man to overlook an offense”—to just leave it between that person and the Lord. Sometimes mercy is confronting an offense and in love helping people escape sinful habits and patterns that will lead them to destruction. Sometimes a situation truly does call for the full measure of justice. But I hope that our first instinct is toward mercy—to be merciful toward our fellow sinners.
So, my friend, be merciful toward those who are suffering, merciful toward those whose souls are in peril, merciful toward reputations, merciful toward the weak, and merciful toward sinners. This will sometimes call us to do what comes unnaturally and with difficulty, but we can have full confidence that we actually can do it for this reason: God asks us to do no more than he has already done—to extend mercy to those who are in desperate need.

There are a number of Christian doctrines that, though important, do not necessarily have a significant impact on our lives or relationships. It may be good to have convictions about infralapsarianism over against supralapsarianism, but that conviction will probably not make a great difference to day-to-day living or to life in the local church. There are other doctrines, though, that have a seismic impact so that your convictions will have significant consequences to your life, to your family, and to your church. An obvious example is gender roles and whether your convictions lead you to complementarianism or egalitarianism.

My convictions align with complementarianism—the view that God, while creating men and women equal in value and dignity, has ordained a kind of complementarity between them so that in the home and church men are to take a position of Christ-like leadership. But while I find the Bible leading me to complementarian convictions in a relatively straightforward way, what has been far more difficult is working out exactly what this looks like in real life. It is one thing to have complementarian doctrine, but another thing to have a complementarian life and church. In other words, it is one thing to acknowledge the doctrine, but another to truly embrace it.
Let’s not act as if this is the easiest challenge we will ever face, because as we attempt to be consistently complementarian, we will face a host of questions that will need to be answered: Does God mean for only men to be elders? Does God mean for only men to be deacons? If only men are to be teachers in the church, can a woman lead a Bible study? What about a youth group? Can a woman lead worship on a Sunday morning or would that be to exercise authority over the men of the congregation? And what if my understanding of some of these questions differs from another nearby church or from the teaching of a well-known “celebrity” pastor?
This is exactly where a new book from Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher has proven so helpful. Embracing Complementarianism is meant to help Christians—and Christian leaders in particular—turn biblical convictions into a positive church culture. “Our conviction,” they say, “is that teaching and practising a robust complementarianism leads people from a reluctant acceptance to a joyful embracing of God’s word in this area.” Their strategy is not so much to defend complementarianism—something that has been done elsewhere and often—but to advance it by helping Christians work it out in the life of their church.
They begin with a lay of the land—an assessment of where culture is at with its understanding of gender and gender roles and they are blunt in describing how both the wider culture and the Christian church have often failed in protecting women and in freeing them to do all God desires them to do. They describe some of the debates in the church and explain how a teacher like John Piper differs from one like Carl Trueman. With this done, they provide a relatively brief defense of the complementarian position and its understandings of both equality and distinction.
The heart of the book begins in chapter 4 where the authors show that we tend to fall into two equal and opposite dangers—the danger of overemphasizing the differences between men and women and the danger of underemphasizing them. They want their readers to understand that, though there are some gender-specific commands in the Bible, the great majority are given to men and women alike. Yet with gender being so fundamental to who we are, we must expect that these commands will be fulfilled in gendered ways. “The way in which we are kind, or express encouragement, or love our neighbor, and so on, will be shown through our gender—and that will, on average, look somewhat different between men and women. And that is a good, right and enriching thing to be embraced.” There are implications to this. While some roles in the church may be reserved for men, the church must be a place where life together welcomes and displays expressions that vary according to gender.
A chapter about the goodness of men leading in ministry shows how and why God has called men to lead in the church, but introduces questions that leaders will need to wrestle with: Does this include deacons? Does this include ministry leaders? And so on. Chapters on understanding church and understanding ministry continue to answer some questions while introducing others, to solve some of the biggest issues but to leave the peripheral ones to be worked out according to context and conviction. Two final chapters continue to guide leaders in faithfully working out complementarian doctrine in their churches. Here they describe and urge a “mapping exercise” in which leaders will think carefully about how convictions can be expressed in the whole life of the church.
To be complementarian has always been to be counter-cultural. If that was true a few years ago, how much more today when society’s questions have progressed from “what can women do as well as men?” to “what is a woman, anyway?” Yet I agree with these authors that church members tend to respond to a confident, convictional, and robust complementarianism. I very much appreciate their desire to encourage believers to truly embrace complementarianism by practicing it in a way that is worth embracing—one that is faithful to God’s Word, that celebrates both the distinction and equality of the genders, and that frees both men and women to serve in all the ways God permits and invites them to. It’s my hope that many church leaders will read this book and carefully work through it as they attempt to implement a complementarianism that honors God and is faithful to the Scriptures.

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Charles Spurgeon said it. Billy Graham said it. And even though it’s not really all that funny anymore, most of us have probably said it as well. It goes something like this: “Don’t bother looking for the perfect church since, the moment you join it, it won’t be perfect anymore.” Zing!

There’s truth behind the quote, of course. It would be impractical and, frankly, ridiculous to expect that a bunch of sinful people could join together to create a sinless community—to imagine that perfection could arise from the confluence of a hundred lives as imperfect as yours and mine. Yet, though we know perfection is impossible, don’t we all sometimes still grow frustrated at the sheer messiness of Christian individuals and Christian churches? Don’t we all sometimes face the temptation to pack up and move on when our fellow believers act like the sinners they are?
A little while ago I was speaking to a young man who is a fan of computer-based Role Playing Games. He explained that what draws him to these games is the ability to custom-craft a character, then to discover how that unique character interacts within the world of the game. When he creates a new character, he is given a finite number of points that he can allocate in a nearly infinite number of ways—some to strength, some to intelligence, some to charisma, some to agility, and so on. In the end he has always created a character that has both strengths and weaknesses, all depending upon the way he has allocated the points. What he can never do is create a character that is only strong and not the least bit weak.
Though the comparison between a church and game may threaten to be trite, I have actually found it helpful and, frankly, encouraging. There seems to be a law in this broken world that every strength is tempered with some kind of a weakness, almost as if there is a finite number of “points” that can be allocated to any individual or any church. A pastor who is an especially powerful preacher may be an especially weak counselor; elders who are skilled and vociferous in defending the truth may fall short in grace and love; a church that takes worship services seriously may be lax when it comes to evangelism. None of these weaknesses is defensible and none of them is okay. Yet some kind of imperfection is always inevitable on this side of glory.
What’s true in churches is true in families. A husband may be extremely diligent in leading and providing, but lax in his spiritual disciplines. A wife may have penetrating insights into the Word, but be uncommitted to extending hospitality. Kids may be obedient but lazy, or hard-working but mouthy. We ourselves have to admit that for all our virtues, they continue to be tempered by a host of vices.
This being the case, it is irrational to expect that any one church, any one pastor, any one husband or wife, friend or child, can excel in every way. And this faces us with a challenge: Can we learn to tolerate their shortcomings? Can we learn to live with the way their “points” have been allocated? While we certainly don’t need to embrace sin or apathetically accept ungodliness, we do need to accept the inevitability of some faults, some defects, some areas that will always remain a sore disappointment. And, realistically, we have to know that even if there was strength in one area we lament, it would probably mean there would be weakness in one area we admire. No individual and no community of individuals can be the complete package. It just doesn’t work that way.
Hence, the path to joy in church, marriage, and life is to accept that there will always be imperfections, to accept that there will always be areas of disappointment—but to be willing to celebrate the strengths while tolerating the weaknesses. Just as it is the glory of a man to overlook an offense, it is the glory of a Christian to overlook a weakness—to find greater joy in what encourages than in what disappoints.